Portrait of a Family
by Precocious Prat
Summary: In which Pandora Lovegood learns what makes a mother good, even after death.


**A/N: My first story in a very long time. Hope you enjoy and if you have any concerns, feel free to PM me.**

Pandora had not meant to be a bad mother. Every intention in her was to be rather good, to be more present and capable than her husband Xeno, no matter how loving he might be. She had meant to be so good, so attentive to her little daughter, an example of a strong witch who could focus on her career and family simultaneously. Things just did not work this way. Part of this was Xeno, though Pandora did have a tendency to blame him a little more than he deserved.

Yes, he loved their Luna, perhaps more than he loved anything else, but he was simply not a good father. What good father let their toddler daughter wander the garden unsupervised while he just typed away on his newsletter? Luna was quite happy to be alone, hunting for the Snorkack or whatever it was that day, but Pandora quite disapproved and would let Xeno know the minute she looked out her laboratory window and noticed. Not that he much cared, delighted as he was that his child adored the search as much as he did. And what father left every detail of the household to Pandora, left her with the cleaning charms and Luna's bathtimes? Brilliant though he was, she sometimes wondered if Xeno had ever even learned to enchant a broom. It was simply irresponsible of a father to ignore his daughter to write about such silly subjects; the world was magical, but not nearly as much as Xeno saw it. Though wasn't that one of the reasons she loved him?

Their curiosity had united them too, their inquisition into the magic that surrounded them. Her husband loved it as though it was mystical, an unknowable force to be cherished but never questioned. For Pandora, it was all the more awe-inspiring because magic was explainable, quantifiable, researchable if you just looked hard enough. She wanted Luna to learn that from her, not just observe the incredible creatures and plants but understand their biology. This was something Pandora felt wizards and witches sorely lacked and her Luna was much too brilliant to become just another awestruck fool taking her world for granted.

There was still love in their marriage, there was love in her exasperation and his forgetfulness. It was impossible not to feel love when their ray of light Luna shone as brightly as her hair, when their strange and cozy tower of a home sat colorful and wild and full. So even if Pandora felt frustration at times, even if she spent long hours in her laboratory instead of beside Luna in the nursery, she loved both her child and husband. She loved the time she spent tending the herb garden while Luna played nearby. She loved stealing those quiet moments with Luna in her arms as Xeno painted little portraits of them, happy bits caught between lab work and keeping the house running. She loved singing lullabies to the sleeping Luna, able to catch an hour with her even if the little one was asleep, then walking through the at-last silent house and seeing the paintings her husband created next to his diagrams of the next species he hoped to find. She was particularly fond of one in which Luna, on her ninth birthday, sat in her lap slightly wriggling and full of excitement as Pandora smiled down at her. It had a place of honor above the printing press in their main room, next to where Xeno promised to one day put the prized horn of a Crumple-Horned Snorkack.

Luna was only nine when Pandora went from being an often-busy mother to a completely absent one. The experimental spell that Pandora was working on was meant to be stable, otherwise she would not have let her daughter read in the library nook of her laboratory. She was supposed to have decades more time to bond with her child, to teach her and learn from her and love her, but magic is fickle and spell creation fickler. So though it was not meant to happen, though Luna was not meant to see the spell backfire and her mother die, so it went. Things sometimes just go.

What Luna was too grief-stricken to remember and her father too forgetful to think of was that her mother's favorite portrait of the two of them had been dislodged several months earlier, after another map of Sweden had been spello-taped to the wall above the printing press. The portrait now rested underneath the machine in a rather dark corner. As Pandora had always been the one to clean their rook, no one even remembered to sweep underneath the press and it laid there for quite a long time. Xeno, despite his faults, was gifted in multiple ways and had charmed his paintings to move and hold bits of the subjects' souls within their portraits, and in this way a part of Pandora remained in the house. Unfortunately, one of the only times Xeno had listened to his wife's requests was when she ask that he not charm the paintings to speak because so many were of young and often loudly gibbering Luna. But Xeno, in his creativity and compassion for even the smallest part of a person, wanted his painted people to have fun, so they were free to eavesdrop on all the gossip that went on in the house and discuss it amongst themselves. This would have been benefitted Pandora and little painted Luna more if there had been any more paintings left in the house, but the day after his wife's death he tore down each of the paintings he had created and hid them in an enchanted drawer which he purposefully avoided for years forward.

Soon after the spell's explosion and Luna's shocked silence and then sobbing, Pandora realized that the real version of her was dead. She had always been a rational person, however, and realized that even if most of her was gone, this sliver existed and felt just as keenly and thought just as deeply as the original. And though Pandora might have not been able to interact with the outside world, three things made her existence bearable. Firstly, little Luna on her lap who stayed with her. Secondly, their ability to hear what when on in the house, even if it was too dark underneath the machine to see what went on. Thirdly, the two of them could talk freely and so there was never a dull day, curious and inquisitive a child as painted-Luna was.

And a child painted-Luna remained, even as real-Luna grew. Pandora wanted her painted-girl to be able to go explore just as real-Luna did, to adventure in the woods or read in the trees beside the stream as she knew her reality-daughter did. But for painted-Luna there was only the expanse of their main room with its over-stuffed armchairs and a long tunnel which led to a void which Pandora assumed was the enchanted drawer. She wanted to read new books to painted-Luna just as she heard her other daughter reading aloud in the main room. And she wanted to hold real-Luna as she cried for her mother in the night, then as she became increasingly distant from reality, too much like her father for Pandora, too much in need of a mother.

She loved both of her Lunas dearly, loved their curiosity and brilliance and kindness even as real-Luna went off to Hogwarts, even as the world began to darken in ways she had never wanted for her child. Even as Voldemort came back. With time, too, Pandora changed; she realized that a child could not grow on facts alone and she mixed the little lectures and answers she gave to her daughter with the fairy tales and fantastical myths that Xeno so enjoyed. She asked more questions of her little daughter, tried to learn from her as much as she taught her. She learned a bittersweet happiness in paint that she never found while alive. She did yearn desperately to see her aging daughter's face, to speak with her and tell her how proud she was of her for standing up for justice in the face of this incoming darkness, to tell her husband that she loved him and missed him and that he was raising their daughter well, to go on the creature hunts that had always seemed silly to her while alive. Yet she also found some sort of contentment, knowing that her world was small, her ever-young daughter's smaller, but that they had each other and it could be enough.

It took years and more years yet for a change, but one day painted-Luna wandered away from Pandora to a place her mother could not follow. Even in the void drawer, Luna would not respond to Pandora's calls and she became despondent in the wait, afraid that her one joy had been taken. Hours later, little Luna skipped back to her from another tunnel like the ones that led to the drawer, already chirping about her new friends: a wild-haired girl with a hesitant but full smile; a gangly boy with a pox of freckles and loud laugh; a girl with his same red hair and a quicker wit; a bespectacled boy with a mop of dark, unruly hair whom the others looked at with admiration; a sweet, shy boy who often stared at the last of the group- a girl with long blonde hair who, little Luna reported, looked alarmingly like her mother. Luna did not fully understand this existence which she lived, but she knew enough to recognize this was a version of her older self with the other friends and so she did not fret when her mother began to cry. And every time little Luna came back from her visits with her friends, to that place Pandora could not go because no version of herself had been painted there, she cried a little less but felt just as much joy as that first day.

All was not well, but better, when Pandora first heard the keening. Little Luna, never content to stay put when a mystery was at hand, leapt from the painting to the mural upstairs, but soon came back shaken. She told her mother about the man who she knew had been her father, now in a terrible disarray with a crazed face, who had spotted her darting in the mural and begged her to tell him where his Luna was, where could he find his daughter. Painted-Luna shook in her mother's arms as Pandora listened to her husband's wailing and crazed talk, shouting that he needed to find his Luna, that they had taken her, that he could not lose his Luna. When he wasn't desperate he was despondent, staring at the mural of Luna with her friends, trying to catch little Luna but unable to communicate with her. He tried and tried to open the drawer which he had so long ago enchanted shut, but the years and the grief had taken a toll on his memory and the drawer stayed locked, so his only images of Luna were the mural she had painted, a small photograph of all three of them which Pandora couldn't find a tunnel to (she guessed this was because it was not painted), and the elusive little Luna whose original painting he could not find or access. He tried painting more portraits of her, but each came out shakier than the last, too unrecognizable for Luna to move to even if she did want to face the frightening man who only bore a passable resemblance to the father she had so loved.

Months passed like this, Luna clinging to her mother's presence, huddled in the painted armchairs as Pandora listened for any news of her real-Luna. Finally, two young wizards and a witch arrived and little Luna recognized their voices and excitedly told Pandora that these were her friends, Harry, Hermione, and Ron. She became even more excited as they and Xeno spoke about her favorite story, the three brothers and the Deathly Hallows, while Pandora sat entranced finally able to hear new voices after years. It took hearing an explosion directly ahead to shock her from her revery and she and little Luna were swept from darkness into the astonishing brightness of the main room, now in utter chaos. Soon there were pops and screams and more explosions, too much noise for either of the painted figures to comprehend, before it was silent again. Pandora was reminded of what had been her real self's Death Day, before this had become her real and only self, and she held her daughter close as they both cried.

The mural had been destroyed, Xeno's paintings still locked away, and neither little Luna nor Pandora knew what to do in the few months which followed. They simply stayed in their painted room, glad at least for the blue sky they could see through the ruined roof and for their slightly protected spot from the rain. The world was no longer darkness and that was a little freedom, even as uncertainty reigned. So it stayed until the day that little Luna and Pandora heard footsteps approaching. A young woman appeared, starry-eyed and fair-haired and Pandora knew her daughter who looked so like her and so like her father. The young woman looked around, unperturbed by the chaos but closely inspecting any hiding spots for mementos of her strange, ruined home. This is how she found the painting of her mother and her little self, the one she dimly remembered her mother loving. And as she saw her mother's face for the first time in a very long time, she smiled and Pandora smiled back. There were no tears, too overwhelmed were they. Tears would come later, as Luna painted on the largest canvas she could find every person she loved surrounding her mother so that Pandora could meet each one, as she disenchanted the drawer and found years' worth of a family she could barely remember, as she painted new portraits with no silencing spell and landscapes where little Luna could explore, as she and Pandora spent long nights talking, as all four of them, Xeno included, read stories together and created new ones. For now, Luna and Pandora just looked at one another and smiled.


End file.
